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Ki and Auras
Chi Manipulation (also known as Ki Manipulation) is the manipulation of a natural energy coursing within the body. In the Ranma world there are plenty of ideas of what Chi, Qi, Ki, spirit energy, and many other names is and how it works. None are particularly right and none are particularly wrong. It is really outside a humans ability to perceive or describe. Sort of like extra-dimensional geometry. So vocab can be interchangable and contradictory depending on whose talking. Overview There are three parts of a person. The physical body, the spirit, and the soul. The soul and body are hopefully self-explanatory. The spirit is sort of the glue that binds the two together. It is also what makes up a person's aura. The aura of course reflects emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual well-being. Now everything has a physical body or form. Anything alive has a spirit. Anything that could be described as a person has a soul. Spiritual beings like the Ghost Cat would have just a spirit and soul. Ghosts and astral projections may just be the spirit or may be both a soul and spirit depending on the situation and who you ask. Everything with a spirit is constantly producing and releasing spiritual energy though and depending on who you ask this may be absorbed into inanimate objects giving them their own aura. It gets complicated when you have people disagreeing on what inanimate means though. i.e. people who believe rocks naturally have spirits themselves. (the Gaia hypothesis raises the question whether or not the Earth has its own aura or just the aura of everything living on it, or if there's a difference). Auras and spirit energy cannot be picked up by the physical senses but the human mind does interpret them as if physical descriptions could apply. Both unconsciously (as normal) and consciously (such as when a character brings their aura into the "visible" spectrum). This is why we can associate different colors, temperatures, and weights to things like emotions and personalities. The most spiritual sensitive would also be able to attribute smells, sounds, and tastes to different auras. Contrary to what our senses tell us, the least "real" of these plains is the physical one. The most real is the soul. The spirit falls in between. Martial Artists in Ranma 1/2 make both unconscious and conscious use of their spirit and aura in their fights. Attacks and maneuvers that appear to break the laws of physics are actually taking place on the spiritual plain on some level. The more physics defying the move the less of a "physical" move it is. This is why an attack that shatters concrete (something without an aura, or at least something with a very passive one) won't really effect a character as much. And its how characters like Happosai and Cologne can fight. They're using their spirit and aura and just dragging their body along for the ride (chestnut fist anyone?). Mystical pressure points and the like are also attacks on the spiritual level. Theoretically, one could also fight using only their spirit or even their soul but I'd save that for when you want to have Ranma fight a real physical god. How this would work for some of the techniques we've seen? When we seem to see an aura enter the visual spectrum it’s not being drawn out, but drawn in. Normally a person's aura and spiritual energy is thickest within their body and extends outward becoming thinner and thinner. It naturally focuses where we are paying attention acting as a sort of subconscious sonar. Which in turn creates the feeling of being watched. Your own aura can feel itself being "pinged". So when a martial artist want to focus their aura they don't let it just disperse and dissipate. They grab hold of it and draw it in. At this point the aura becomes so thick that even the less spiritually aware can sense it and it eventually is interpreted as physical sensations. The Soul of Ice is NOT a way for someone to act emotionless. Instead it trains a person to control their emotion so that they are stoic, cold, detached. Think of the idea of killing in cold blood, a tranquil fury, giving somebody the cold shoulder, etc. This is contrast to being hot-blooded. A burning passion, etc. The Umi-Sen Ken however, IS a method of making someone as emotionless as possible. I imagine it is insanely difficult because it relies on doing the opposite of what comes naturally to a martial artist. Instead of focusing ones aura and drawing it in, it instead relies on actively dispersing ones aura and allowing it to become indistinguishable from the constant background static of all the auras constantly being pushed out by living things. This also requires having as small an emotional and physical presence as possible. Draining oneself of emotion, controlling ones breathing, hell even ones heart rate to just disappear into the background. When done correctly the opponents spirit is fooled into believing the user isn't there. And since I've already mentioned how the spirit is more "real" than the physical body, its "senses" trump the physical ones. I reiterate the insane difficulty of this technique because the user then has to be able to move while maintaining as much of this state as possible and then to be able to quickly gather their aura back to attack and disperse it again when retreating. As for spirit attacks like the moko takabisha and shi shi hokudan, these attacks require a single emotion for the simple reason that it helps the attack hold together. If one threw a ball of normal aura at an opponent it would fall apart because it was made of different "materials" with different "weights". The downside to using these emotions is that they can create a positive feedback loop but its pretty easily broken in most people. The same way forcing yourself to smile or frown will make you happy or sad, so does focusing on different emotions in you aura. Category:The Dark Lords of Nerima Category:Technique